Saturday, April 4, 2009

LiveJournal by Microsoft - Seems Like Anything with LIVE in the Title Ain't So

I have discovered folks with LiveJournal pages before, and briefly entered the LJ world and asked myself, "But why?"

This morning I located a dear friend with a lot of content on his LiveJournal page and I wanted to connect with him, to commune, to join. Here's the sequence of the last 15 minutes and why I won't be back to LJ for a long time. [And these guys want to OWN the CLOUD!? Please!]

I did all kinds of fun activities. Like selecting the format of my journal, customizing the colors and appearance. I uploaded my newly "pro-ed" twitter picture [maybe that threw a wrench into the guts of LJ] and did all the validations and approvals I could find. I had joined with my OpenID. I validated an email address and clicked on the link, entered a Captcha phrase and it all looked good to go.

There were even 5 different ways for me to select "Post an Entry." But no matter what I tried, and believe me I wanted to put up a single page, an account placeholder so folks in LJ-land could find their way to my "actual" WordPress blog. But perhaps the uber-sentient MCP knew what I was up to. And here is the "so sorry" response I got no matter how I tried to Join and Post.

So, being the webby guy that I am, and now engaged in the pursuit of stupidity, I dug a little deeper to see where the disconnect was.

Okay, level BASIC, Status ACTIVE, Email (validated). All looked good here, but still an error when I tried to post. So I explored the little blue help button to the far right of my Account Level.

This I like, "LiveJournal aims to offer all users the vital journaling features for free. However..." You read it, the entire thing sounds like lawyers were telling programmers what to write and nobody talked to the writers on the team. Excuse me this is Microsoft here. Microsoft is having problems with the expense of running the LiveJournal site? Never did figure it out and I don't suppose I ever will. Hopefully my buddy will contact me using the other methods allowed.